Nathan Englander

1 7 2 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W D A V I D G A L E F The question of what it means to be a Jewish American writer has as many answers as it does authors. Consider Isaac Bashevis Singer, then Cynthia Ozick; Bernard Malamud juxtaposed with Philip Roth; or Rebecca Goldstein and Allegra Goodman: magisterial , demotic, irreverent, earnest, schticky, obsessed, feminist (you can decide who’s what). But all their stories are shadowed by a history that goes back millennia, with a lot of bittersweet humor. If being the chosen people means exile and su√ering, runs a complaint to God in an old joke, ‘‘Maybe you could choose someone else for a change?’’ In the twentieth century and beyond, the issue is complicated by modern Jews who leave the flock for more secular pastures. But at base is usually the intersection of the individual and the religious community, and in turn the religious community and the society containing it. Nathan Englander entered this pantheon in the late 1990s with his debut short story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. His latest book is the novel kaddish.com, which came out this year. k a d d i s h . c o m , by Nathan Englander (Knopf, 224 pp., $24.95) 1 7 3 R The seriocomic vein that runs through his work is as evident as ever – but first, a little background. In For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, what got Englander the attention he deserved was a series of memorable setups taken to their logical-absurdist conclusions. In the story ‘‘The TwentySeventh Man,’’ Stalin signs a death warrant for twenty-seven dissident writers – but the twenty-seventh person on the list isn’t a writer at all, simply a schnorrer included by a clerical error and sharing a cell with doomed literary greats. In another story, ‘‘Tumblers ,’’ a group of Jews bound for Auschwitz gets on the wrong train, and they find themselves mistaken for a troupe of acrobats set to perform before the Führer, with only one day before their act goes on. Other premises are less grim but equally mindwarping : a rabbi who supports his shul by moonlighting as a department store Santa Claus; a Park Avenue WASP financial analyst who suddenly becomes a Jew on his cab ride home one afternoon; or, in the title story, a husband whose wife is cool toward his sexual advances and who receives special dispensation from his rabbi to visit a prostitute. The setups are somewhat reminiscent of those in the stories of the Israeli fabulist Etgar Keret, some of which Englander has translated. Englander’s second collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, is more measured and serious, but it retains the bittersweet tang, starting o√ with the title story, a pitch-perfect ri√ on Raymond Carver’s ‘‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,’’ but featuring two couples talking about the Holocaust and their Jewish heritage: ‘‘They’re in our house maybe ten minutes and already Mark’s lecturing us on the Israeli occupation. Mark and Lauren live in Jerusalem, and people from there think it gives them the right.’’ Besides having an excellent ear for mimicry, Englander is a master at what comedians used to call the old switcheroo, as in his story ‘‘Peep Show,’’ in which what you see across the smudged plexiglass divider may be either your rabbi or your mother. Truly memorable short stories, not just the flavor-of-the-month sex-and-surrealism, ordinary narratives set in global trouble spots, or voice-driven narratives with too much echo in them aren’t that common. Englander’s language is both precise and evocative. Besides earning the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the 1 7 4 G A L E F Y Short Story and the Frank O’Hara International Short Story Award, Englander has also won a Guggenheim Award. Englander’s novels are a somewhat di√erent a√air. His first, The Ministry of Special Cases, traces a Jewish family caught up in the Dirty War in mid-1970s Argentina...